Basic study on rehabilitation support system for upper limb motor function

This paper presents a rehabilitation support system for the exercise of upper limb motor function. The system supports occupational therapy for recovering physical function and is used for reaching exercise of the upper limbs, especially the shoulder and elbow joints. This system is effective for people with advanced problems. It allows patients with motor dysfunction of the upper limb to keep motion ability, to increase residual ability, and to recover from low-grade dysfunction. A subject sits at the rehabilitation table, grasps a rehabilitation grip, and moves it accordingly to exercise motion shown on the display. The rehabilitation grip is driven by actuators of the X-Y table in order to generate assisting force instead of human therapists. By applying impedance control to the X-Y table system, the motion assistance is realized. In order to evaluate the patient's dysfunction the system is equipped with a surface EMG (electromyogram) to measure the active potential of the muscles and a CCD camera to measure the range of motion etc. By applying a trial experiment to some healthy students, the effectiveness of the proposed motion assistance control and the performance of the measurement system are verified.